Focus on Germany London Office The Chandlery Office 609 50 Westminster Bridge Road GB London SE1 7QY Tel 00 44 20 77 21 87 45 Fax 00 44 20 77 21 87 46 feslondon@dial.pipex.com www.fes.de/london May 2006 Executive Summary Muslim Children and the'Right to Religion': The Long Road to Islamic Religious Education in Germany 1. Introduction and Legal Basis The majority of immigrant children in Ger­man schools come from a Muslim back­ground(600,000). To make these children participate in Christian religious education would neither be desirable nor would it con­cur with the basic tenets of the German constitution, which states in article 7.3:"Re­ligion is a standard teaching subject which must be taught in agreement with the basic rules of the religious communities." Reli­gious education is therefore not a privilege of the Christian churches. As a result of the federal system in Germany, the various Länder all have different pilot projects pro­moting Islamic religious education in the German language in state schools, in which religious groups and associations are in­volved in varying ways. ­In Lower Saxony Islamic religious education is offered at 19 educational institutions. ­Baden-Württemberg is planning trial pro­jects at 12 primary schools in This paper is a summary of the paper "Muslim Children and the'Right to Religion': The Long Road to Islamic Religious Education" by Friedhelm Kraft, FES-London, May 2005 cooperation with local parent associa­tions and mosque committees for the 2006/2007 school year. ­From 2001, schools in North Rhine­Westphalia, Bavaria and Bremen have offered"Islamic Instruction" in German and this now applies to approx. 200 pri­mary schools. ­In Berlin, the Islamic Federation offers its own religious education courses which are attended by more than 4,000 boys and girls. So far, there is no Islamic religious educa­tion in the sense of the"denominational teaching subject" prescribed in the German constitution(like Christian religious educa­tion), since there is no representative insti­tutional partner for the education authori­ties. It is characteristic in all these trials that in­struction is oriented towards the"correlation principle" applied to Christian religious edu­cation. In class, the boys and girls are meant to acquire the ability to relate the ba­sics taught by the Qur'an and Sunna to their own life in Germany and to other peoples' “real-life” experiences.